Global warming and rapid urbanization have caused frequent occurrences of heat waves and urban heat island effect, presenting a significant threat to health of urban residents. Researches have indicated that cooling services provided by parks are essential in alleviating impact of heat wave events and urban heat island effect. However, previous researches on park cooling services center around cooling effect, with a lack of exploration regarding the fairness of such services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince the 16th century, Western countries have conducted extensive plant collections in Asia, particularly in China, driven by the need to collect botanical resources and foster academic development. These activities have not only significantly enriched the Western botanical specimen collections but have also had a profound impact on the development of related disciplines such as botany, ecology, and horticulture. During this process, a large number of renowned plant hunters emerged, whose discoveries and contributions are still remembered today.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlant diversity exploration needs to be accelerated because many species will go extinct before their discovery and description, and many species-rich regions remain poorly studied. However, most contemporary plant collections prefer to focus on a specific group, which hinders the exploration and conservation of plant diversity. Therefore, we need an alternative approach to the dilemma at hand.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrasping information about street trees can assist urban environmental managers in quantifying and evaluating their costs and ecological benefits. Street view imagery has the potential for urban street tree surveys. However, few studies have been conducted on the inventory of street tree species, size structures and diversity based on street view imagery at the urban scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Total Environ
February 2023
A land use simulation model with coupling constraints of ecological security patterns (ESPs) and multiple scenarios (MSs) was developed using the PLUS model. The research scale was zoned with environmental functional regions, where land management policies were formulated. A case study in Anji County successfully demonstrated the application of the ESP-MS-PLUS model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUrban geometry is known to be one of the major factors in explaining the intra-urban temperature variations. A commonly used indicator to describe the urban geometry is the sky view factor. However, the existing studies have shown that the relationship between SVF and urban temperature is quite contradictory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpectrochim Acta A Mol Biomol Spectrosc
December 2019
The severity of inhalable particulate matter (PM) pollution in the atmosphere is increasing; however, plants can effectively reduce the concentration of atmospheric PM by retaining it on their leaves. In this paper, eight common garden plants in Hangzhou, China, were selected as the study objects to observe the morphological features of the leaf surfaces and the retained particles and to analyze the elemental composition of the particles. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) was performed to detect the morphological features of the leaf surfaces, and the relationship between the roughness of the leaf surface and the number of the retained particulates was quantitatively analyzed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFloral scent is an important part of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from plants, and is influenced by many environmental and endogenous factors. To investigate the influence of temperature on the emission of the floral scent of , the number of chemical compounds and their relative release amounts from four cultivars of under different temperature treatments, were identified using the solid-phase microextraction (SPME) technique and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) in this study. Results revealed that the numbers and release amounts of floral scent components were significantly influenced by different temperatures, and depend on different cultivars and different types of compounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQuantitative real-time PCR (RT-qPCR), a sensitive technique for quantifying gene expression, depends on the stability of the reference gene(s) used for data normalization. Several studies examining the selection of reference genes have been performed in ornamental plants but none in sweet osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans Lour.).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs noise pollution is becoming more and more serious, many researchers are studying the noise attenuation effect provided by plants. This article examines six kinds of evergreens as research subjects so as to compare the different arrangements and densities of plants and their effect on noise attenuation. The authors studied the relationship between each of the plant's characteristics (the characteristics include leaf area, leaf fresh weight, leaf tactility, and leaf shape) and their average relative noise attenuation (deltaLAep).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLeaf senescence is often caused by water deficit and the chimeric gene P(SAG12)-IPT is an auto-regulated gene delaying leaf senescence. Using in vitro leaf discs culture system, the changes of contents of chlorophylls, carotenoids, soluble protein and thiobarbituric acid reactive substance (TBARS) and antioxidant enzymes activities were investigated during leaf senescence of P(SAGl2)-IPT modified gerbera induced by osmotic stress compared with the control plant (wild type). Leaf discs were incubated in 20%, 40% (w/v) polyethylene glycol (PEG) 6000 nutrient solution for 20 h under continuous light [130 micromol/(m(2) x s)].
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe authors assessed the willingness of residents to pay for urban green-space conservation in Hangzhou, China, using the contingent-valuation method. The aim of the study was to provide policy makers with information that would be useful for making informed decisions in urban-development planning. The findings of the study are as follows: 1) The willingness of residents to pay for urban green-space conservation was positively correlated with their perceptions of the benefits of green spaces and negatively correlated with perceptions of the annoyances.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolymeric coatings with high protein-binding capacities are important for increasing the output of affinity-based protein purification and decreasing the detection limits of antibody microarrays. This report describes the use of thick poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) brushes to immobilize as much as 80 monolayers of protein. The brushes were prepared using a recently developed procedure that allows polymerization of 100-nm-thick poly(tert-butyl acrylate) films from a surface in just 5 min along with hydrolysis of these films to PAA in 15 min.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effects of exogenous silicon (Si) on plant growth, activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), guaiacol peroxidase (GPX), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), dehydroascorbate reductase (DHAR), glutathione reductase (GR) and catalase, and concentrations of ascorbate and glutathione were investigated in cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) plants treated with excess manganese (Mn) (600 microM). Compared with the treatment of normal Mn (10 microM), excess Mn significantly increased H2O2 concentration and lipid peroxidation indicated by accumulation of thiobarbituric acid reactive substances.
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